About The Best American Nonrequired Reading Committee

Our selection committee consists of a handful of high school students. Onecontingent is in the Bay Area and a second is in Ann Arbor, Michigan.These students help Dave Eggers edit The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Daniel Gumbiner is the book's managing editor; Henry W. Leung and Jia Tolentinoare the assistant managing editors facilitating the committee in Michigan.

This collection, published by Houghton-Mifflin, compiles the country's best

fiction, journalism, essays, comics, and humor every year, and introduces

a large readership to dozens of new writers and publications.

The Best American Nonrequired Reading committee—comprising

students from dozens of different high schools—meets nearly every week of the

Woah! Swear BANR meeting was yesterday, but of course, there is always more work to be done. There is always something to be improved and guess what? a large group (by Elissa's standards) of intellectuals gathered in the production room (the basement of McSweeny's) and within the timespan of one hundred and twenty minutes, each of the five grasshoppers learned from the master sensei of InDesign, Elissa herself. Through a prepared lesson about the basics of Adobe's book making software, printouts of shortcuts keys, and show & teach, her knowledge of the software was passed on.

I learned of the following: basic page layout, copy editing vs. editing vs. proofreading, orphans & widows, and many people have dreams dealing with vampires.

Things to keep in mind+First graph (the first paragraph) is always FLUSHED LEFT+Body text (all subsequent paragraphs after first) is always indented at the start of the paragraph+Every page has a page # except the first page+Every page has a header except the page containing the title of the selected piece+No prepositions at linebreaks for titles